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ACLU Sues Baltimore Police Department Over Aerial Surveillance Program:
On the first day of April, Baltimore officials approved a deal between the Baltimore Police Department [(BPD)] and Ohio-based company Persistent Surveillance Systems to use drones equipped with high-resolution cameras in order to spy on the city's residents through around-the-clock surveillance despite formal objections filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Defense Fund.
[...] On Thursday, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the BPD seeking to block the program, saying that it will put everyone in the city "under constant aerial surveillance," WBALTV 11 reports.
"It is equivalent to having a police officer follow us, each of us, outside all the time in case we might commit a crime," said David Rocah, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Maryland. "If that happened in real life, everyone would clearly understand the privacy and First Amendment implications, and it would never be tolerated."
[...] The spy planes can cover at least 90% of Baltimore's land area at any given moment. The ACLU fears that the technology can be combined with the BPD's ground cameras and license plate readers and that all of that data can be tied together and used to provide detailed information as to the identities and activities of the city's citizens.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @04:35AM
The usual standard for this thing is the idea that in public, there is no expectation of privacy.
Walking around? Caught on camera from every storefront, every police cruiser, every passing smartphone? You have no cause to go to court because you were in public.
I could easily see the BPD saying that all they're doing is putting cameras where they want them, rather than every streetlamp, thereby beings less intrusive and more selective.
In the present era, where we think of the terrorists, paedophiles and pirates all the time, I can see them getting away with this argument - and I'm sure that the ACLU's lawyers know this.
The open question then is: if the ACLU knows this and anticipates a possible loss, why are they fighting it, to enshrine it in case law?
I suspect that they may want to motivate a change in that doctrine, precisely by losing this case and screaming about it.